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June 19, 2011

You think you know about 1861, right? Confederates soldiers open fire on Union soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, forcing a Union surrender and the beginning of the Civil War. Battles followed, families torn apart, a nation divided, slaves are emancipated, the Confederacy wears out, and surrenders, everyone is happy until Lincoln is assassinated. Of course if you're a Civil War expert, you know much, much more than that. But I would guess that even if you consider yourself an expert, you probably haven't looked at 1861 in the way Adam Goodheart does in his new book--conveniently titled 1861--about the beginnings of the war.

Instead of trudging chronologically through the events that led to the beginnings of war and the early battles, Goodheart focuses in tightly on a variety of less-covered topics: the slow, long debate within Fort Sumter, as the Federal troops led by Major Robert Anderson tried to figure out what to do; the formation of the "Wake Ups," an informally organized group of young men who began to prepare themselves for war against the Confederate states; the role of the large German immigrant population in St. Louis in keeping Missouri from seceding; the story of how California was kept from seceding from both the Union and the Confederacy; how escaped slaves who arrived to help Union soldiers pushed the decision for emancipation.

Most intriguingly, Goodheart tells the story of Elmer Ellsworth, little known now, but (according to Goodheart) practically a rock star in his day. Ellsworth, a young man from upstate New York, saw a French Zouave regiment perform and became fascinated by their gaudy uniforms and strenuous gymnastic moves. He formed his own American Zouave regiment and actually went on tour with them; if you can imagine, audiences cheered the young men as they jumped, rolled, and waved their bayonets in sync. Picture a dance team, except armed. Afterwards, Ellsworth studied law, clerking in Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois, office. Lincoln liked him and brought him to Washington after Lincoln was elected president. When the war broke out, Ellsworth offered to form a new Zouave regiment. However, instead of filling his ranks with bright eyed young boys, he decided to recruit the toughest men around--New York City firefighters. The "Fire Zouave Regiment" took over Washington--they weren't the most gentlemanly unit around, but they sure came in handy if a fire broke out.

Ellsworth led his unit to one of the first actions of the war, a venture across the Potomac to take Alexandria, Virginia, back from the Confederates. While trying to take the Confederate flag down from an inn, Ellsworth was shot, becoming the first soldier killed in action during the Civil War (there is a story that Mary Lincoln had seen the Confederate flag flying in Alexandria and said she wished someone would take it down, thus prompting Ellsworth's foolhardy action. But the story is unconfirmed, and Mrs. Lincoln, nutty as she was, takes enough historical crap; let's leave her out of this one). Ellsworth received a massive state funeral and served as an inspiration to young men who joined the Union army. And now he is virtually forgotten.

As much as I love history, I've never been much of a Civil War aficionado--too many other people are, so I stubbornly resisted. But I really enjoyed this book--it's well written and covers material that you didn't sit through over and over again in junior high school and high school. Whether you are a Civil War expert, or a relative newcomer, I think you will enjoy it too.

June 02, 2011

I'm sure there are a lot of interesting stories from the 1849 California Gold Rush, but I've always been partial to the Yukon Gold Rush myself, the subject of Howard Blum's new book, The Floor of Heaven.

Or perhaps I should say the lead up to the Gold Rush--Blum chooses three restless characters from late 19th century America who felt their opportunities were running out as quickly as the old West they knew was disappearing: George Carmack, a Marine deserter with dreams of gold; Soapy Smith, a con artist in need of new places to scam; Charlie Siringo, a cowboy-turned shopkeeper-turned Pinkerton detective. All ended up in Alaska.

Carmack had been stationed in Alaska as a Marine and had become attracted to the Native Americans and their lifestyle. He skipped out of his Marine enlistment after a few years, but after aimlessly trying to scrape along back on the continental US, he knew he had to return to Alaska. His father had been a failed gold prospector, and George had inherited his dreams of a big strike. He was convinced that there was gold in the desolate Yukon, and set off to find it. Along the way he married a Taglish woman and practically became an honorary member of the Taglish tribe. His wife's family was high-ranking and he began to think that his destiny was to become chief of the tribe, rather than a gold prospector. He couldn't lose his conviction that he could find gold, though, and set off into the Yukon in search of his fortune. He found it, setting off the Yukon gold strike, but in Blum's retelling of the events, the gold riches made him bitter, jealous, and distrustful. It's an almost too good to be true moral tale where "money can't buy you happiness."

Jefferson "Soapy" Smith was taught con games by a carnival hand and made his biggest hit with a con that won him his nickname--he enticed audiences to buy overpriced bars of soap on the chance that they might get one with a hundred dollar bill hidden inside. He kept slipping out of the law's hands, but eventually ran out of places where he wasn't known in his chosen territory of Colorado. And as boomtowns turned into cities, he began to run out of the kind of desperate, wide-eyed listeners who were ready to fall for his kind of con. He hoped to get rich in Alaska, and while he didn't strike gold, he did become the de facto dictator of Skagway, a town that was the "gateway to the Klondike," the last stop before eager prospectors headed into the rough country to find their own gold claim. For a while, Smith was king there, but when he cheated a miner out of his gold find, the town had had enough. Smith was gunned down in a shootout with vigilantes who finally decided to stand up to Smith and demand the return of the gold.

Charlie Siringo had worked on big cattle drives, but after marrying, decided to settle down. He got the idea to open a cigar store and while that was a big success, he found himself wanting more. When he saw an ad for Pinkerton detectives, he applied, was hired, and found he had a knack for the job. He had the logic to piece together clues, a flair for disguise, and the patience and nerve to immerse himself in a criminal gang and wait until he had all the pieces in place to make an arrest. He ended up in Alaska when a large amount of gold was stolen from an operation that melted down gold nuggets and processed them into gold bars. Siringo discovers it was an inside job and goes undercover to win the confidence of the thieves and find out where they buried the gold. He cracks the case and retrieves the gold with high drama, which seems to be how Siringo did everything. After he retired, he wrote memoirs about his cowboy and detective exploits, which eventually landed in Hollywood, where he acted as a consultant on Westerns, some inspired by his life.

As you can see, these are colorful characters that could easily have come out of a novel rather than a nonfiction book, and this book, while rated as nonfiction, has more than a little of a novel in it; in the afterword, Blum acknowledges that it is tough to tease out the real story from the self-dramatizing memoirs and tall tale nature of the primary source accounts. It's more than likely that the version pieced together by Blum isn't the gospel, factual truth. But this isn't a court of law and this material isn't on the AP US History exam. It's a fun, easy read, written in the loose, laconic style of a paperback western. The stories in this book may not all be true, but it has some of the true spirit of the time and the people of the Yukon gold strike.

Books that claim to unlock the mystery of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays are so plentiful that they practically constitute their own genre (anti-Shakespeare studies?). At first glance, I thought James Shapiro's Contested Will was another entry in that category, but I was wrong--Shapiro's book is actually an examination of why people refuse to accept that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him and what their choices for the "real" author say about them and their times.

I admit that Shapiro is preaching to the choir here--I'm one of the people who believes Shakespeare wrote the plays (or most of them--some of them are collaborations), with some assists from the actors, stage managers, and printers who cobbled together the printed versions that we have come to know as Shakespeare's work (or sometimes unassists--whoever decided to stick in all that Hecate and witch song and dance junk in Macbeth committed a crime against theater). Why do I believe this? Because, quite simply, the arguments people have put forth for why he didn't write them just aren't good enough for me. Give me a serious reason why this man could not have written these plays and I'll begin to look for a new author.

In 1992, 28,000 children's bath toys were lost at sea when a container ship hit rough seas on a journey from China to the US. A few years later, mild-mannered--seriously, really mild-mannered--high school literature teacher and sometime magazine writer Donovan Hohn heard about this story during a flurry of reports of rubber duckies being spotted at sea. He couldn't get the image out of his head, this most innocuous and cheerful of children's toys floating lost on the high, dangerous seas. He thought it would make a good story for a magazine, perhaps something that he could research with a few phone interviews. Instead, Hoch found himself on a multiyear odyssey that mixed him up with warring environmental groups in Alaska, beachcombers in Washington State, toy manufacturers in China, hard-living sailors on a container ship, and scientists in Greenland. And those are just a few of the people, places, and topics covered in Hohn's book Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. While on his wild goose (duck?) chase, Hohn becomes a first time father, has back surgery, and leaves his teaching job. You might say that Hohn has more adventures than the ducks.

I always love books where you learn a lot of different things, where one topic spins out into another, creating a giant web of interconnected strings of information. Sometimes my eyes glazed over a little at the detailed explanations about plastic composition or ocean currents (I would have expected the latter to captivate me a little more, but nevertheless), but the overall big ideas made an impact--most notably that our attempt to manage the world's vast amount of plastic garbage through recycling or cleanups, seems virtually hopeless, but to drastically cut down on our use of plastic would throw our lives back into the 19th century. And while that may appeal to some people, I admit that I'm not ready to go back to a world where I would be typing this on a heavy metal typewriter and doctors rationed injections because of the cost and fragility of glass needles. The best we can do, it seems, is just grimly try to make sure we're not using too much really pointless plastic--individual plastic water bottles, packages with too much plastic, disposable plastic dishes--and hope a less damaging alternative will eventually be invented.

Hohn is the opposite of outdoorsy, and one of the last people you would choose to have helping out on board a ship in rough seas. He is physically awkward and afraid of just about everything. It appears that the only thing stronger than the many fears he feels is his own curiosity and persistence--and as someone who teaches American literature, including "Moby Dick," he is more than a little familiar with the pitfalls of excessive persistence. But while Hohn makes himself and his personal journey a part of the story, he doesn't cross the line into bathetic, overly self-reflective territory. He is a wry, self-deprecating narrator, who is both distanced enough from himself to realize when he looks like an idiot, but who is close enough to the reader that when he writes near the end of the book, in the middle of another cold, wet, improbably adventure, that he fervently wishes to have a nice quiet job with insurance that will keep him chained to a desk all day, you genuinely feel sympathy for him (well, at least I did). Best of all, he has that most important of all qualities for a nonfiction writer--curiosity. I recommend this one.

After reading several books about John Adams, I thought, "You know, John Quincy Adams had a really interesting life-he'd be a great subject for a biography." I never pursued that thought, though--the closest I've gotten is Mrs. Adams in Winter by Michael O'Brien, a book about Adams's wife Louisa, and the journey she made one perilous winter during the Napoleonic wars from Russia, where John Quincy Adams had been a diplomat, to Paris, where he had been assigned to help negotiate the end of the War of 1812.

Even in the nineteenth century, it was recognized that joining the Adams family was a formidable task. Louisa grew up in London, the daughter of a British woman and a rakish American who had a large, cheerful family, quite different from the diffident, rational intellectual Adams's. John Quincy was not a man of much emotion, or looks or style, but still managed to propose to Louisa after a whirlwind courtship. Then he kept on putting off marrying her, mostly because of money concerns that he kept to himself--the start of an ongoing problem--which left Louisa and her family puzzled and embarrassed. Eventually they married, though it seems like Adams was almost forced into it. Nevertheless, they finally did the deed, and Louisa was welcomed into the Adams family. They were never less than helpful and warm to the young bride (especially the sympathetic Abigail), but it always seemed like an awkward fit, based on O'Brien's depiction.

Adams spent most of his life career zigzagging around Europe--Prussia, Russia, France, the Netherlands, Britain--with stops in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., sometimes with Louisa, sometimes without. Their letters to each other were affectionate, but their marriage was more of a partnership than a love match. Adams was brought up to believe his life should be all about service to his nation. He felt more comfortable studying, reading, and writing than socializing, which as a diplomat, he was called to do at a dizzying pace. Louisa was more willing to have some fun in her life, something Adams didn't really get--when she arrived at a party in St. Petersburg with some rouge on her face, as was the fashion, Adams actually pulled her onto his knee and wiped it off her face. Her main focus in life, however, was her children and she was shattered when one of them died. Adams was sad, but not nearly as devastated as Louisa; he was more willing to accept this as part of life and God's plan. His inability to understand her grief seemed to cause a divide between them that was never quite completely bridged. Of course they remained together but at that point, Louisa appears to have had some realization that they were never going to be as close as perhaps she may have hoped. Probably no one could ever be terribly close to Adams (again, I am basing all this off of my reading of [author's name] book).

O'Brien seems to have wanted to turn the focus of the book into a story of Mrs. Adams's friendship with some of the more memorable women of the day, including those she stopped to visit on her way to Paris. I felt like he wanted to make it a book "about women and women's lives in an age of men" or how upper class women had their own vibrant, close society during an era when they had little power in the world at large. This felt a little weird to me, like an attempt to say something larger and more important and definitive when in reality, Mrs. Adams's life and the specifics of her journey--about post houses, carriages, etc.--is interesting enough on their own for this very readable book. I may be wrong, but I felt a little bit of an earnestness and a desire to instruct in the tone of the book sometimes, and while that isn't necessarily bad, or a dealbreaker when it comes to reading, it made me feel more like sighing or rolling my eyes a bit than nodding and appreciative. It's still a fine book, though--the beginning is livelier than the end, but I'd still recommend it, especially for people curious about travel in the early 19th century (and I love 19th c. transportation history!).

I had to find an excerpt from this book for a high school essay writing project, but as I skimmed, I was so intrigued that I ended up reading the whole thing--which is't much of a task, since it's super short and easy to read. It gives as vivid and terrifying a picture of groupthink as you're likely to find. The part of the book where a group of diehard Maoist kids walk through the streets and try to think up more "revolutionary" store names to replace the "capitalist" ones is both hilarious, scary, and so bizarre it's almost hard to believe. But that's the way kids who grew up under the hardline communist rule of Mao thought and behaved. The book is full of normal kid activities reflected in a bizarro mirror of red propaganda. Yes, it's very YA in style, but I thought it was fascinating.

Money Makers by Ben Tarnoff

I was very excited to read about this book--counterfeiters in American history? What a rogues gallery of characters they must be! And they are. Kind of. Tarnoff's book is informative and elegantly written. He explains why counterfeiting was so popular and easy very well, and gives details about the counterfeiters themselves and some of their exploits. However, I'm not sure if this topic should be quite so elegant, instructive, and careful. It struck me as one of those nonfiction books that feels like an expansion of a very good dissertation. When I finished it, I felt like I appreciated the book, but didn't get the wow out of it I'd been hoping for. Maybe I expected too much. I always get my hopes up far too much when it comes to books.

The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

I found this book while doing one of my favorite things--looking through the bibliography of a book I really liked, in this case Moby Duck. Harvey is onto an interesting topic--map thieves, meaning the type of thief who sneaks into college libraries and slices century old maps out of books and sells them to collectors, a segment of the antique business that has been growing in profitability since the 1970s. He centers his story around Gilbert Bland, a map thief who raided an astonishing number of libraries before finally being caught, put on trial and jailed. Along the way, Harvey gives a great deal of information about the map collecting industry and map thieves.

Also, unfortunately, he also gives a great deal of information about himself. I can't say exactly why, but I always had a feeling that he felt he was the star of the show. Harvey meets plenty of interesting people, but somehow the interviews with them often felt more like "Here I am interviewing this person" than "Here is this person." He also dove a little bit too deeply into pop psychology for me. He researched the life of Bland extensively and while examining his motives for the thieves says (to paraphrase), "You could think that he did it all for the money, but I'd rather think he did it because his parents got divorced." Ummm, really? After reading about the thief, it sure seemed like he did it for the money to me. Harvey's theories just felt like they were based on squishy reasoning. There were other instances in the book when given an option between choosing a melodramatic or rational reason for someone's actions, Harvey chose the drama. It's a shame--Harvey had a lot of good stories for his book; they didn't need pumping up.

This is another instance where I praise one author for doing something, that is putting himself in the story--Donovan Hohn in Moby Duck--and then condemn someone else for doing the same thing. Again, the best answer I have is just that one does it better than the other. I really hate criticizing authors. I do--I'm willing to believe that maybe I was just in the wrong mood, or maybe I just have the wrong personality for that type of writing. So I would urge you to take away from this write up that there are still many reasons to read this book--like I said, map thievery is a quirkily good topic that certainly has not been beaten to death and there is valuable information here. And maybe your tolerance for the things that bothered me will just be higher.

Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra won many awards and received excellent reviews when it was released last year. And it deserves every single bit of praise given.

I can't think of any criticisms of Cleopatra: A Life. It probably helps Schiff's cause that I know so little about Cleopatra and her time period, as well as, I am ashamed to admit, the Roman Empire (seriously, everything I know about Julius Caesar is from Shakespeare). That meant almost everything in the book was new and exciting to me. Really, I am so easy.

Schiff had a challenge on her hands--there really isn't a lot of primary source material specifically about Cleopatra and her life. This means a lot of the detail comes from information that does exist about life in Egypt at the time of Cleopatra's life, and about the Egyptian rulers in general (two thought to take away--Alexandria was Shangri-La and Rome was a dump; Egyptian royal family members killed each other at a rate that would put the mob to shame). This kind of biography can be a little dicey--it gets very annoying after a while to constantly read sentences like, "One suspects she may have thought..." or "we can imagine her doing..." and so on. I came down hard on Tilar Mazzeo for this in her biography of the Widow Clicquot and her founding of the champagne dynasty. Yet here I laud it. Why? I can't quite say other than simply that Schiff just does it a lot better (apologies to Ms. Mazzeo). It's been several months since I read the book, so I can't give you examples. All I can do is say I can't imagine who wouldn't like this book. Unless you're someone who hates history or biographies. And even then I'd say to you, "No, I swear, you'll like this one!"

I don't enjoy going to the ballet nearly as much as I love--make that adore--the backstage world of the ballet. I can never pass by The Red Shoes or The Turning Point if they're on TV, and some of my favorite books as a child were Noel Streafeild's "Shoes" books, many of which are set in dance schools. I like clothes and shoes influenced by dance, and am fascinated by how dancers looked in other time periods. I took dance classes for many years to no avail--I am an outright awful dancer. But that never diminished my interest in the other aspects of dance.

So I was thrilled to read about Apollo's Angels, a history of ballet written by Jennifer Homans. In the end, though, I feel more glad that I read it than excited by it.

The good: This is an exhaustive, well-researched history; I doubt there are many other available books that rival its scope and detail. If you need a history of ballet, this will set you up for further research. Homans's country-by-country approach allows readers to see how national character influenced the developement what was supposed to be a universal art form; to this day, even with dancers crossing borders regularly and dancing the same pieces, you can probably still tell which country a company is from. She does important work in explaining the way politics affected the style and growth of ballet--this isn't just a cultural history. Homans is admirably not shy with pointing out what is wrong with the world of ballet and when the art form has gone off the rails. The numerous photos are gorgeous and could be a book on their own (actually, the photos tell my previous point about "when ballet goes bad" as well as the text).

The bad: For something as lively and visceral as dance, I found the book to be somewhat quiet and occasionally static. The thing it's most missing is lively characters and first person stories, especially in the early parts of the book. I don't know if this could be helped, though; there may not be many surviving letters and diaries from people involved in the early days of dance in the 17th and 18th century. In the later periods Homans does devote time to the personal lives of important figures such as Diaghilev and Balanchine, but even these sections still feel a bit remote; probably the liveliest sectin of the book is the story of the rise of Rudolf Nureyev and his landmark defection to the west, although that also curiously lacked Nureyev's own voice. I don't think there was a quote from him at all. And this is typical of the book. I wonder--and this is a huge generalization, so don't hate me dancers (because I don't hate you!!)--if dancers may not have been historically the people who inclined towards writing down everything about their lives, experiences, and everyday battles. However, there are dancer memoirs, especially in the last few decades, but Homans doesn't really go into them. Maybe she just thought that since those were available, she was better off spending her time covering some of the other topics I mentioned above. I do wish, though, that someone would uncover a treasure trove of letters from an 18th century ballet dancer.

I also felt that Homans did not give movies their due. I don't think you can underestimate how ballet on film--not filmed ballets, but Hollywood, narrative features that incorporated ballet--helped people become interested in ballet, especially in the US. She touches on The Red Shoes, and mentions Fred Astaire, maybe Gene Kelly even more briefy (sorry, it's been a few months since I read this), but doesn't really discuss how these two stars--and others--were passionately committed to the idea of bringing dance to the masses (and in Kelly's case especially, also committed to making the point that dance was as viable a choice for boys as athletics). You could write a whole book on dance in film, and I'm sure more than a few people have. But even in a comprehensive history like this where there is so much to cover, I thought film deserved a bit more. But this is just my own personal axe to grind, I guess.

Still, Apollo's Angels is more than worth your time for dance historians or anyone just interested in dance or the history of the arts. You won't get the glitter, lights, sweat, and stardust found in a good backstage story, but you'll get a lot of other worthy pieces of information.

You know, sometimes you just expect too much from a book. Okay, I guess I expect too much from a book far too often, but that's another story for another day. The book in question this time is Colonel Roosevelt.

Colonel Roosevelt is the final part of Edmund Morris's Roosevelt trilogy. I read the second book, Theodore Rex, which covers TR's presidency, and enjoyed it so much that I was very excited when the third part was published last year (oddly, in the intervening years, I never felt compelled to read the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. I really should someday). When expectations are high, though, disappointment is often around the corner.

There is nothing wrong with this book. Nothing. There is no reason why anyone would not find it very readable and informative. The only problem I had was that I could not stop comparing it to other books. One was Theodore Rex, and the other was River of Doubt, by Candice Millard. The latter, about Roosevelt's ill-fated journey down an unexplored tributary of the Amazon River, was my favorite book of 2009 (?). But Morris concentrates mostly on Roosevelt's earlier, successful African journey and only goes through the basics of the South American trip. This actually makes sense--he cites Millard's books in the notes, and probably thought, "Why should I spend a copious amount of time retelling this story when there is already this wonderful book about it and I have so many other things in TR's life to get to?" I guess my real problem with Colonel Roosevelt was that I loved River of Doubt so much, well, I just wanted to read that again.

There certainly is enormous value in this book. I was surprised at how reluctant TR was about his last hurrah presidential campaign; I always thought he charged into it like that bull moose, but he really was dragged in because of a frustrated sense from a sector of his fellow Republicans that he was the only one who could save the country from Democrats--and Taft. The African journey is interesting (despite what I've said in the past, disaster exploration stories are of course better than smooth-sailing exploration stories). Morris writes well and the book is obviously the product of much detailed research. But you can't deny that it is not nearly as fun to experience the decline of the fierce Roosevelt lion as it is to watch him stride about and roar.

I'm sorry I haven't written anything for so long.I'm sure you struggled on without me, though. To say that the start of 2011 was rough would be that wild understatement we're always hearing about. To say that this has been one of, if not the worst, four month stretch of my life, would be more accurate. Things might be getting better, though--I'll keep it at "might" instead of "are" because one of the many things I've learned during this period of stormy seas is that whenever you think you've hit bottom, there's always deeper to go.

I did manage to read some books worth noting (the library is always your friend--well, except when your fines are approaching the $20 mark because of--all right, I won't get into it). I definitely don't have time to give them all the kind of lengthy, rambling treatment I usually like to write, which may be to the world's benefit; really, no one needs a 3,000 word book review from me. I've been torn about whether to put several short ones into this post or give them all their own little place. I'm inclining towards the latter. What do you think? Yes, I thought you'd say that.

You know what the sad part is? I have already forgotten even the titles of several of the books I've read since January, which perhaps doesn't speak well for them, but more likely says terrible things about my sieve head memory. The whole reason I started writing this blog was to make sure I remembered everything I read, and sadly, I think I have just proved the necessity of that.